Famed opera star treasures the variety of roles on the low end of the vocal spectrum

“I like beautiful roles where there is a wide space for acting,” Furlanetto said. “Thomas Becket is much less known (as an operatic role) than King Philip, or Boris or Don Quichotte, but it doesn’t offer anything less as a character. So it is really a wonderful privilege to do it.”

Furlanetto has sung virtually all of those roles with the San Diego Opera, where he performed for the first time in 1985, when the company’s new general director, Ian Campbell, engaged him for Verdi’s “Oberto.” Campbell had first encountered him at the Metropolitan Opera, where Campbell was briefly assistant artistic administrator before settling in San Diego.

“He had the physical stature and he was impressive on stage,” said Campbell, who is directing “Murder in the Cathedral.” “But there was a warmth in the voice that he carried right through to the top. And I found it had a personality. You cared about the sound. There was this extra dimension. It wasn’t just a good voice singing nicely; there was something more that came through.”

Furlanetto credits that “extra dimension” to the time he spent with the legendary stage directors of a previous generation, among them Franco Zeffirelli (“in his good years”), Patrice Chéreau and Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, as well as the work he did with conductors including Georg Solti, Leonard Bernstein and, in particular, Herbert von Karajan.

The legendary von Karajan, music director of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Salzburg Festival, engaged Furlanetto as an understudy in a televised production of “Don Carlo.” Then he put him onstage at the last minute when the scheduled bass was unable to sing.

“Fifteen minutes before the opera was going to start, I went to his studio,” Furlanetto said. “He told me, ‘In the aria, you sing it the way you have always sung it and I will accompany you.’ And he did, because I didn’t have one single minute of rehearsal onstage.”

It marked a turning point for Furlanetto. Before that, he had always been slightly nervous onstage; but he had absolutely no nerves on that occasion. And the performance propelled him to another level of international attention.

“When the curtain closed at the end of the final performance, I was a bit dizzy in that moment,” he said. “My concentration collapsed and I realized what had happened to me. In 12 hours my life had changed just like that.

“I feel sorry for my young colleagues that today there doesn’t exist anybody like Karajan. He was the super god, someone from another planet in comparison with all the others. He could change your life.”

Trying times

Now Furlanetto looks around him and he sees only mortals, and incompetent mortals at that, particularly among stage directors.

“We’re living in the time of superficiality, approximation and incompetence,” Furlanetto said. “We are constantly getting directors who are from the movies, or from Broadway, or from anyplace that is not opera. And they consider opera directors, the real ones, out of fashion.

“It is an artistic depression that is awful, and it starts most of the time from the top — from the artistic directors of the theater who are not today coming from the roots; they are going for people who are able to find money rather than cast an opera.”